A New Sustainable Location-Routing Problem with Simultaneous Pickup and Delivery by Two-Compartment Vehicles for a Perishable Product Considering Circular Economy

Abstract

Ending the natural resources of the earth is a momentous issue, which brings everyone’s attention to the necessity of sustainable development. To tackle this problem, products need to live their complete lifecycle according to the circular economy concept. In this problem, a new network for the location-routing problem is designed with a specific application for perishable products. Two-compartment vehicles become responsible for gathering the expired products to the recycling centers in dual-purpose routes by simultaneous pickup and delivery. After reprocessing perished products, these products will be sold out to the secondary market, in order to complete their life cycle. With the inspiration of the three sustainable development pillars, the network implementation costs are minimized in the first objective function. While minimizing the environmental side-effects in the second objective function and maximizing the satisfaction of society in the last one. The new mathematical model is validated through the exact method in GAMS software. Because of the NP-hard nature of problem two multi-objective meta-heuristic algorithms are developed and tuned for large-sized problems. Finally, some metrics of the multi-objective algorithms are compared to find the efficient one. Copyright © 2019 IFAC